David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

The chess mentality offers rich pastures in which psychoanalysts may safely graze. Freudians in particular have delighted in speculating on what subconscious drives govern the average chess player. Ernest Jones, pupil and biographer of Freud, wrote a paper in 1930 entitled “The Problem of Paul Morphy.” He focused on the relative impotence of the central piece, the king, leading him to the startling deduction that chess is “adapted to gratify at the same time both the homosexual and antagonistic aspects of the father-son contest.” Grandmaster Reuben Fine, himself a psychoanalyst and author of a book about the Fischer-Spassky match, was also taken by the role of the king and the sexual connotations of the game of chess. Ignoring female players, he maintained that the king aroused castration anxiety among men, since it “stands for the boy’s penis in the phallic stage, the self-image of the man, and the father cut down to boy’s size.” Fine concluded, “Chess is a contest between two men in which there is considerable ego involvement. In some ways it certainly touches upon the conflicts surrounding aggression, homosexuality, masturbation, and narcissism.”

Fine used his psychoanalytic tools to analyze Fischer. He saw particular import in Fischer’s statement that he would like to “live the rest of my life in a house built exactly like a rook.” According to Fine, the libidinal undertones expressed in this desire are impossible to ignore. The preference offered “a typical double symbolic meaning: first of all it is the strong penis for which he apparently finds so little use in real life; second, it is a castle in which he can live in grandiose fantasy, like the kings of old, shutting out the real world.”

The Freudian view remains ultimately unfalsifiable and so not, in the view of many philosophers, scientific: certainly in this extravagant form, it is difficult to take seriously. What a survey of great players tells us is that all human life is there: drunks and womanizers, the happily married and the lonely, the businesslike and the otherworldly, the religious and the atheistic, the democratic and the totalitarian, the honorable and the treacherous. But alongside their brilliance, at their competitive acme they share one other quality—an uncommon steeliness of character.

In no high-level sport does a player need to be tougher psychologically than in chess. In most sports, nerves dissolve in the flow of the action; in chess there is a deadly surfeit of time for brooding. Most professional games last several hours. A match against the same opponent can go on for several weeks. A whole hour can pass waiting for an opponent to make a move, while the inevitable question nags insistently: Has a weakness been found?

If panic, doubt, or defeatism creeps in, the affected player may begin to see less clearly, begin to adopt too cautious an approach or, in desperation, too cavalier a style. The conviction may grow that an opponent is seeing further and deeper. Inspiration becomes impossible. The British journalist and chess fan Dominic Lawson puts it vividly:

In all sports confidence is important. In chess, a game which, unlike all those others, is entirely in the mind, with no trained limbs to take over when the brain is in crisis, a collapse of confidence is terminal. Above all, across the board the opponent can sense this mental bleeding, as clearly as a boxer can see blood oozing from his adversary’s head.

As in all walks of life, in chess there are various mechanisms for handling the stress. It is possible that Fischer coped in part by channeling it into rage. Certainly some players (notoriously, for example, Mikhail Botvinnik) have a talent for loathing an opponent, a loathing that improves their performance at the board, sharpens their sense of competition, and channels their aggression. Korchnoi is in that class, too, capable of whipping up antipathy for a single game.

Though very competitive by nature, Spassky belonged to a far rarer breed. Like Smyslov and Tal, he wanted to befriend his opponents, to create an atmosphere conducive to weaving creative magic. For him chess was more artistry than slow-motion Sumo wrestling. And like Taimanov, as an artist he needed the stimulus of spectators.

Of course, Spassky had learned to control his emotions and to stifle any expression of feeling, though in earlier days he was often ill after a tournament, afflicted by tonsillitis and a high temperature. But later on, the German grandmaster and psychologist Helmut Pfleger measured the stress levels (blood pressure and so on) of a number of grandmasters in a major tournament in Munich. He discovered that Spassky was the calmest. Spassky’s serenity was an asset: any champion would have had his nerve tested by the manner in which Fischer stormed his way to the final.

In the world championship cycle, the Zonal, the Interzonal, and the Candidates, the United States, like the USSR, was considered a zone in its own right, Zone 5. The U.S. Championship doubled as the U.S. Zonal, with the rules stating that the top three placed players would qualify. However, for several years Fischer had boycotted the tournament. His grievance was that it was too short: with only eleven rounds, a player who suffered a loss of form for one or two days could be put out of the running. The organizers said they could not afford a longer tournament. In 1969, Fischer was absent again; the three players to qualify for the Interzonal were William Addison, Samuel Reshevsky, and Pal Benko.

Fischer had not played competitive chess for eighteen months, and many thought he would never return. Then, to general surprise and delight, he agreed to participate in the Soviet Union vs. the Rest of the World in 1970 in Belgrade. To even greater amazement, when the Danish grandmaster Bent Larsen demanded that he play on Board One for the Rest against the leading Soviet, pointing out quite reasonably that he had achieved the best tournament results over the previous two years, Fischer yielded the point and agreed to step down to Board Two. It meant that he played Petrosian rather than Spassky.

Despite his voluntary concession, Fischer was fuming. Knowing how he could take his anger out on tournament organizers, the press monitored his every movement. Soviet grandmaster Mark Taimanov says reports on Belgrade Radio were akin to battlefield dispatches: “Fischer has left the room,” “Fischer has ordered dinner in the restaurant.” However, the American’s humor soon improved; though handicapped by a lack of practice, he beat Petrosian in the first two rounds and drew with him in the last two. Meanwhile, Spassky and Larsen shared the honors with a win apiece. (Spassky’s win became famous—achieved in seventeen moves; it was one of the quickest in grandmaster history.) The Soviet Union edged to victory overall by a single point.

Representing their countries, Fischer and Spassky were to meet at the chess Olympiad at Siegen in West Germany in 1970. Naturally, there was great pressure on both men. Spassky was spotted puffing away tensely on cigarette after cigarette before they faced each other. Hundreds gathered in the hall to watch the game; Fischer had ensured that the table was kept several yards away from the spectators.